


Don't Talk To Her At Night

by nocrimeinthearchive



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Rule 63, but not the one where I decide what to do with black widow, genderbent, the one where i actually decide whether or not the winter soldier happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:18:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocrimeinthearchive/pseuds/nocrimeinthearchive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky speaks Russian in her sleep. Steve hasn't told her yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Talk To Her At Night

Bucky speaks Russian in her sleep.

Steve hasn't told her yet.

***

The first time it happened, the air conditioner in their apartment was broken and they were lying in bed in the oppressive summer heat. 

Bucky had fallen asleep around eleven, lulled by the hum of the floor fan and the deadened wash of traffic noise sliding in through the open bedroom window, and was curled naked into herself with the small of her back barely touching Steve's bare hips. Steve was sprawled out in a frustrated haze, dropping in and out of grabs of sleep that she wasn't sure if she was imagining or not and timing the night with every oscillation of the fan's head. 

Bucky murmured something into her arms and the halo of hair messed out around her - a jumble of syllables, the nonsense of a dream conversation spilling out into the real world. In the dirty green half-light Steve could see the shadows on her arm shift as the muscles tensed. 

The arm was a lot of things for Steve. Many of them she didn't think about. There was a part of her girlfriend that simply wasn't her girlfriend - an entire section of her body which had been put there by someone else for their own ends. The upgrades Fury had implemented helped, somewhat; at least now when Bucky touched her with her left hand, Steve didn't feel every punch she'd taken from it. But it was still there, underneath the skin: a piece of the enemy living off Bucky Barnes. 

(The synthetic skin SHIELD had worked up was realistic in every detail except one: it tanned completely and utterly evenly. If one part tanned, the whole arm tanned with it. Either Bucky wore tank tops all summer, or by the end of the season her left side looked like a poorly-made doll - and she slept with a shirt on until neither of them could see the join again.)

Steve sighed in exasperation and rolled over and lightly kissed the back of Bucky's neck. Bucky squirmed away slightly and the murmuring got sharper, but even this was nothing new; sometimes they would go whole weeks waking up on opposite sides of the bed, muscles sore from fighting in their dreams. Steve shifted her hips slightly and curled around the space surrounding her girlfriend, the white of the sheets marking the thin border between her and wherever Bucky had found herself tonight.

When she thought back on it, Steve assumed she fell asleep again somewhere around here, face resting on the mess of Bucky's brown hair and her arms bent into wherever there was space. There was a gap in her memory, anyway - a part where she didn't remember being foggy and sticky and covered in thick heat, where Bucky's murmurings had become the background noise to a vague, shapeless dream. Mostly, though, she remembered the next part.

The murmuring stopped - a brief silence, a momentary confusion as Steve woke up, or came out of her reverie, or whatever it was - then Bucky's entire body tensed, back cording, legs stiffening, and she spat Russian into her hands.

Steve stood naked beside the bed, shaking, staring down at the Winter Soldier. There were a lot of plans for something like this. There was a big file. Fury had been very specific about it.

She was still standing there when whatever was on the bed melted away and Bucky woke up in the mid-morning glare, blinking and smiling bemusedly up at her, asking what time it was. 

***

The second time it happened, they were on the subway, coming home after a ballgame that had stretched out into the fourteenth inning and ended with a bunt.

It was nearly a year after the first time. Steve had never brought it up and Bucky had no memory of it - or if she did, it was just another dream where she was fighting the war she had been engineered for. Speaking Russian was probably not uncommon in her dreams, as Steve rationalised it. Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. It wasn't like she had tried to... Anyway, it had happened, and it was best to move on. 

So she had. 

The train was close to empty - one or two drunk stragglers, other evacuees from the game, and a man in a crumpled suit who had apparently missed his stop several hours ago and hadn't woken up since. They had dropped into their seats and Bucky had nestled herself into Steve's arm, resting in against her chest in a happily tipsy slump.

New York was their city and there was nobody in the entire state who didn't know Captain America on sight, so Steve had been looped into conversation with the tourist across the aisle about St Louis' chances at the pennant. She was politely deflecting a question about their clutch ability when she felt Bucky's head droop onto her shoulder. (This also wasn't new. Bucky had no patience for baseball strategy. She just went to games because it meant Steve was sitting still for hours on end and generally loosened up after a few ballpark beers.)

In the rollicking sway of the carriage they sat like this for a while: Bucky dozing contentedly against her girlfriend, Steve lazily talking baseball, stopping every now and again to kiss the top of Bucky's cap when she shifted in her sleep. Sometimes Bucky would mutter something in her sleep about bats or strikes and Steve couldn't help but grin - the conscious Bucky couldn't tell a batting average from her ass. 

Then, like last time, the muttering stopped - not just paused, but stopped, with a sense of finality and a shifting gears. Steve felt Bucky's head twitch under her arm and the set of her neck toughened. Her smile faltered as she tried to keep speaking, but every part of her brain was waiting for it:

Over the squealing of the train's brakes, Bucky hissed Russian into the carriage, and as they stopped three stations before home Steve made hurried apologies to the man across the aisle and dragged her blearily protesting girlfriend onto the deserted platform.

***

The third time it happened, Steve got back in bed before dawn.

***

The fifth time it happened, she managed to laugh and make a joke about Bucky spending too much time at the restaurant two doors down from their apartment block to the startled woman sitting on the other side. She still spent the rest of the flight with one hand on Bucky's wrist.

***

The ninth time it happened, she was back in bed within the hour.

***

Now, when the highway is deserted for a mile in every direction and the quiet jangling of the late-night radio is overrun by another of Bucky's episodes (as Steve has begun referring to them in her mind), Steve is able to pull over to the side of the road and hold her girlfriend's clenched hand in hers until she wakes up and Steve has to invent some excuse about needing a break from the wheel. 

She'll tell her next time, anyway.


End file.
